Directivity Enhancement of Movable Antenna Arrays with Mutual Coupling

TL;DR

This paper explores how mutual coupling in movable antenna arrays can be exploited to significantly enhance far-field directivity, proposing an optimization algorithm that outperforms traditional array designs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to leverage mutual coupling for directivity enhancement and develops a low-complexity optimization algorithm for antenna placement.

Findings

Mutual coupling can be harnessed to surpass traditional array directivity limits.

The proposed GS-GD algorithm effectively optimizes antenna positions for maximum directivity.

Optimized arrays show substantial gain over conventional uniform linear arrays.

Abstract

In conventional antenna arrays, mutual coupling between antenna elements is often regarded as detrimental. However, under specific conditions, it can be harnessed to enhance the far-field directivity (i.e., beamforming gain). Theoretically, the directivity of an N-antenna superdirective array over the endfire direction can reach N^{2}, significantly exceeding the directivity of a traditional uncoupled array which is N over all directions. This paper investigates the potential of mutual coupling effects in movable antenna (MA) arrays for directivity enhancement. A low-complexity algorithm called Greedy Search and Gradient Descent (GS-GD) is proposed to optimize the antenna positions for maximizing the array directivity over any given direction, where the antenna positions are first selected sequentially from discrete grid points and then continuously refined through gradient descent (GD) optimization. Numerical results demonstrate that the optimized MA array design by exploiting the antenna coupling achieves significant directivity gains compared to the conventional uniform linear array (ULA) without antenna coupling over all directions. Additionally, the proposed GS-GD algorithm is shown to approach the global optimum closely in most directions.